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Two water molecules bump into each other, and the one at left steals a hydrogen from the one at right, producing a hydronium ion at left and a hydroxide ion at right. Manuel Almagro Rivas - Own work Self-ionization of water as an animation. Made with Avogadro and GIMP. This file is available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Autoionizacion-agua.gif and it's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work under the following conditions: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.

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Two water molecules bump into each other, and the one at left steals a hydrogen from the one at right, producing a hydronium ion at left and a hydroxide ion at right. Manuel Almagro Rivas - Own work Self-ionization of water as an animation. Made with Avogadro and GIMP. This file is available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Autoionizacion-agua.gif and it's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work under the following conditions: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.

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John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jun-2024 18:48:44 JST John Carlos Baez

If you could watch an individual water molecule, about once in 10 hours it would do this!
As it bounces around, every so often it hits another water molecule hard enough enough for one to steal a hydrogen nucleus - that is, a proton - from the other!
The water molecule with the missing proton is called a hydroxide ion, OH⁻. The one with an extra proton is called a hydronium ion, H₃O⁺.
This process is called the 'autoionization' of water. Thanks to this, roughly one in ten million molecules in a glass of water are actually OH⁻ or H₃O⁺, not the H₂O you expect.
And this explains why protons can move through water much more easily than larger ions can. Let's watch how it works.
(1/n)

In conversation about 6 months ago from mathstodon.xyz permalink